Fantastic Cities

Metropolis, Gotham City, Mega-City One, Panem's Capitol, the Sprawl, Caprica City—American (and Americanized) urban environments have always been a part of the fantastic imagination. Fantastic Cities: American Urban Spaces in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror focuses on the American city as a fantastic geography constrained neither by media nor rigid genre boundaries. Fantastic Cities builds on a mix of theoretical and methodological tools that are drawn from criticism of the fantastic, media studies, cultural studies, American studies, and urban studies.

Contributors explore cultural media across many platforms such as Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy, the Arkham Asylum video games, the 1935 movie serial The Phantom Empire, Kim Stanley Robinson's fiction, Colson Whitehead's novel Zone One, the vampire films Only Lovers Left Alive and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Paolo Bacigalupi's novel The Water Knife, some of Kenny Scharf's videos, and Samuel Delany's classic Dhalgren. Together, the contributions in Fantastic Cities demonstrate that the fantastic is able to "real-ize" that which is normally confined to the abstract, metaphorical, and/or subjective. Consequently, both utopian aspirations for and dystopian anxieties about the American city become literalized in the fantastic city.

Contents

Introduction (Stefan Rabitsch and Michael Fuchs)

Imagining Fantastic Cities

Imagining Gotham: Hard Knowledge in a Soft City (Stephen Joyce)
"Whither Mankind?" The Fantastic Meets the Frontier in The Phantom Empire (Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper)
Cities and Communities: The Urban Vision of Kim Stanley Robinson (Carl Abbott)

Picturing the End of the Urban World

The Banality of the Apocalypse: Colson Whitehead's Necropolis and Mirthless Parody (Jacob Babb)
Cities of the Dead: Urban Vampires in Only Lovers Left Alive and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Jeffrey A. Weinstock)
Confronting Race and Racism in the Post-Apocalyptic American City (Robert Yeates)
The Water Apocalypse: Utopian Desert Venice Cities and Arcologies in Southwestern Dystopian Fiction (María Isabel Pérez Ramos)
"It's not good here anymore": Nuclear Survival and New York City's Space in Kenny Scharf's Videos (Andrew Wasserman)

Freedom and Restrictions in the Fantastic City

Sylvester Stallone and Urban Order in the 1980s and 1990s: Gendering the City in Demolition Man and Judge Dredd (Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns)
"We speak another language here": Samuel Delany's Dhalgren and the City of Folly (James McAdams)
Imagining Digital Cities: Freedom and (Non-)Human Agency in Representations of Virtual Realities (Michael Fuchs and Sarah Lahm)
Sleep Dealer; Or, Tijuana, Ciudad del Futuro (J. Jesse Ramírez)

The City and Its Environments

Terraforming and the City (Chris Pak)
Olympia, Wilderness, and Consumption in Laird Barron's Old Leech Cycle (John Glover)
Ecological Plant-Based Urban Planning Makes Eleanor Cameron's The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet Real (Marleen S. Barr)